Structural Change and Global Trade

Structural Change and Global Trade Logan T. Lewis, Ryan Monarch, Michael Sposi and Jing Zhang Globalization Institute Working Paper 333 Research Department https://doi.org/10.24149/gwp333r2 Working papers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas are preliminary drafts circulated for professional comment. The views in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors. Structural Change and Global Trade* Logan T. Lewis†, Ryan Monarch‡, Michael Sposi§ and Jing Zhang± January 2018 Revised: October 2018 Abstract Services, which are less traded than goods, rose from 58 percent of world expenditure in 1970 to 79 percent in 2015. In a trade model featuring nonhomothetic preferences and input-output linkages, we find that such structural change has restrained the growth in world trade to GDP by 16 percentage points over this period. This magnitude is similar to how much declining trade costs have boosted openness. Moreover, structural change dampens the measured gains from trade by incorporating endogenous responses of expenditure shares to the trade regime. Ongoing structural change implies declining openness, even absent rising protectionism. Keywords: Globalization, Structural Change, International Trade JEL Classifications: F41, L16, O41 *The views expressed here should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, or any other person associated with the Federal Reserve System. We thank Diego Comin, Kerem Coşar, Lukasz Drozd, Colin Hottman, Kiminori Matsuyama, Marti Mestieri, Sebastian Sotelo, Tomasz Święcki, and Kei-Mu Yi for useful comments. This paper also benefited from audiences at the Chicago Fed, the Federal Reserve Board, the International Monetary Fund, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Rochester, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of Wisconsin as well as participants at the 2017 Society for Economic Dynamics Conference, 2017 BNM/IMF Conference on Challenges to Globalization, 2017 EIIT conference, Spring 2017 Midwest Macroeconomics Meetings, Spring 2017 Midwest International Trade Meetings, 2018 AEA Meetings, 2018 SCEIA Meetings, the 2018 Trade Integration and Growth Network (TIGN) conference, the 2018 Econometric Society Summer Asian Meeting, and 2018 NBER SI ITM meeting. Victoria Perez-Zetune provided excellent research assistance. †Logan T. Lewis, Federal Reserve Board, [email protected]. ‡Ryan Monarch, Federal Reserve Board, [email protected]. §Michael Sposi, Southern Methodist University and Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, [email protected]. ±Jing Zhang, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, [email protected]. 1 Introduction International trade expanded substantially in the past 45 years, as the ratio of world trade to world GDP increased from 19 percent in 1970 to 48 percent in 2015. This remarkable growth in trade is primarily due to increased trade in goods; growth in services trade has been comparatively limited. Over the same time period, however, even as trade in goods skyrocketed, total spending on services rose from 58 percent of world expenditures in 1970 to nearly 80 percent in 2015. This phenomenon of “structural change” is thoroughly studied and well known to be a foundational component of economic growth and development. Less appreciated, however, are the implications of structural change on global trade flows and on the potential benefits from trade integration. This paper studies the joint evolution of international trade flows and structural change and asks two related questions: (i) How much has structural change restricted the growth in world trade? (ii) To what extent has structural change affected the measured gains from trade? On the first question, we find that structural change since 1970 has dampened “openness”—an empirical measure of trade as a fraction of world GDP—by 16 percentage points by 2015. This magnitude is similar to how much declining trade costs have boosted openness over the same time period. In addition, this result highlights a mechanism by which openness can change without any change in trade costs. On the second question, we find that the gains from trade estimated in our model are only about two-thirds of those implied by other models without structural change. The key insight is that structural change, as a result of price and income effects, determines what we consume, produce and trade. The data show that the services expenditure share increases with real income and with relative services prices, both of which are endogenous to the trade regime. As countries open up to trade, the relative price of services and real income rise, shifting expenditure to services and partially offsetting the benefits from more-integrated goods markets. In order to fix ideas, we start with a reduced-form computation of counterfactual openness for a world without structural change. We assume that the sectoral expenditure share is fixed at its 1970 level, while each sector’s trade-to-expenditure ratio—“sectoral openness”—rises as in the data. Under these assumptions, openness in 2015 would have been 81 percent, or 34 percentage points higher than in the data, which suggests that shifting toward less-tradable consumption substantially suppressed trade growth in the last five decades. At the same time, it is implausible to assume that sectoral openness would have evolved exactly as in the real world in the absence of structural change; endogenous prices and input-output linkages implied by fixed expenditure shares should have affected sectoral openness. The interactions between these factors call for a general equilibrium model to accurately measure the effect of structural change on trade. We build a multi-country, multi-sector, Ricardian trade model that incorporates endogenous structural change and trade patterns over time, similar to Uy, Yi and Zhang (2013) and Sposi (2018). On the production side, a continuum of varieties in each sector are produced with labor and inter- 1 mediates. Countries differ in their sectoral input-output linkages, productivity and trade barriers, forming the basis for comparative advantage. The evolution of productivity and bilateral trade costs at the sector level influences the patterns of production and trade over time. On the demand side, we adopt nonhomothetic preferences that allow total income and relative prices to shape sectoral expenditure shares, as in Comin, Lashkari and Mestieri (2015). We calibrate the underlying structural parameters and time-varying processes of the model to relevant observables in 26 countries and a rest-of-world aggregate from 1970–2015. Using data on sectoral expenditure shares, sectoral prices, and employment levels, we estimate the key preference parameters, namely the elasticity of substitution between goods and services and the income elasticity of demand for both goods and services. Services have a higher income elasticity than goods, generating a higher services expenditure share with rising income, and goods and services are com- plements. Coupling these with input-output coefficients from the World Input-Output Database and bilateral trade data enables us to back out estimates of productivity and trade costs at the sector level from the structural equations of the model. After calibrating and solving the baseline model, we conduct a counterfactual similar to the reduced-form one. We again deliver constant expenditure shares across time, this time by setting both the elasticity of substitution and the income elasticity to one. The model differs from the reduced-form calculation in that it allows for the counterfactual expenditure shares to impact prices for goods, services and labor, and trade flows, all of which affect sectoral openness. We show that the model-based counterfactual still implies a substantial increase in the global trade-to-expenditure ratio, 16 percentage points or 34 percent higher than in reality by 2015. The model-based effect of structural change on world openness (16 percentage points) is smaller than the reduced-form one (34 percentage points). Why is this the case? The primary reason is that “goods openness”—the ratio of goods trade over goods expenditure—in the counterfactual is substantially lower than in the data. When fixing the expenditure shares at the 1970 level, the goods expenditure share rises relative to the data; however, as a result of input-output linkages weakening the overall effect, goods trade does not rise by the same degree. Our estimates of the gains from trade are lower than those estimated using otherwise similar models that ignore structural change because we consider endogenous responses of expenditure shares to changing trade regimes. In a typical multi-sector framework, the gains from trade— the percent change in consumption when moving from autarky to open trade—are an expenditure- weighted average of the sectoral gains, which are governed by domestic absorption shares and the trade elasticity at the sector level. Since goods are traded more intensively than services with lower domestic absorption shares, the sectoral gains are larger for goods than for services. In our model of structural change, opening up to trade shifts expenditure shares from goods to services, through (i) a decline in the relative price of goods and

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